Greedy Goblin

Friday, August 22, 2014

Dotlan help needed

Update: I got the help I needed, thank you, ignore this post.
This is how the Sov wwnership was in Fountain at 2013-01-01:

This is how many player ships and pods were killed that day:

And this is how many rats died:

Did I find some 20 months old screenshots? No. Dotlan keeps this information, and you can see it yourself, now (Sov, Ship kills, NPC kills). This data is available for every region, every day for years back.

Needless to say how valuable this information is. But I don't know how to get it besides clicking on the various regions and days and copying the information into EXCEL, which would probably make the most patient person mad.

The last resort is making screenshots and getting a picture-reading software. But there must be some more intelligent way of accessing this data. It should be available in chart form somewhere. Does anyone know how to get it? Please write it in a comment.

PS: ironic comment of the day: "... is certainly not running out of ideas any time soon, the planning document is around six pages long at this point and includes years of work." (source)

PS2: It surprises even me that the forum topic about finally banning that filthy RMT site somehow turned into a Goon hate, despite Goons are innocent in this (and their propaganda site isn't involved in any form of RMT). If someone finds a way to channel this Goon hate into a form that is more productive than posting, Goons will be evicted in a week.

PS3: I really hope it was a Pasta fisher. I mean if it's legit, the incursion community is doomed:

19 comments:

what propaganda site? you mean the legitimate media business of Alex Gianturco? stop claiming someone's day job is a propaganda tool for internet spaceships..

If someone finds a way to channel this Goon hate into a form that is more productive than posting, Goons will be evicted in a week.

Well.. nope. Firstly nope because nobody would ever be able to channel it. Secondly nope because even if they could every goon hater thinks they are a special unique snowflake and would turn on each other in a week. Thirdly the time just to run all the timers on goon space would exceed a week. Fourthly who is going to do the fighting? A bunch of highsec publords vs a battlehardened goon force with a super fleet? Riiiiight.

Well you could use the same method that dotlan itself is using. When you load a map, it spits out a json formatted file that contains all the data that you could possibly select on that map. Every system and all the statistics (jumps, kills, podkills, sec etc).

For example, Delve on 1st of January 2013http://evemaps.dotlan.net/js/Delve.js?date=2013-01-01

Not sure if dotlan approves of this kind of data scraping, but it's there.

@First anon: the legitimate business of Alex Gianturco gets money from two things: people clicking on his site for ads and people clicking on his "PLEX" link for affiliate money.

Ad clicks, sure. Plex, not so much. Both needs him to be relevant in EVE. He is relevant as long as Goons are powerful. So to be able to run his business, he must run Goon propaganda. If Goons fall ingame, so does his site.

whilst it is true that eve relevance was important in the beginning, it has now branched out into a much broader news gaming site. It's even been nominated for gaming media awards.

Also while we're at it - they don't just "run propaganda". When they DO have propaganda pieces they are captioned with "this is alliance propaganda, take it with a grain of salt" - even on their OWN SOTG posts etc. To call it a propaganda site is drawing an incredibly long bow. In terms of pure journalistic integrity they are among the best in the gaming media business.

Being "true journalism" and propaganda aren't mutually exclusive. Actually, they are the same. See also: Fox News, New York Times.

Ok sure, but you don't go calling NYT a "propaganda paper" - you call it a news paper.

Also propaganda has certain implications that it is pushing a particular government line... whereas things like Fox push an idealistic line (in much the same way that you push an idealistic line in your blog).

Why do people keep insisting sites such as TMC are RMT? There's no evidence to suggest so.

First off they are offering ISK for services which is allowed by CCP, they are not offering ISK for cash.

Second they are making money on adverts and an affiliate link however none of these people get any ISK or in game reward for doing so, the money is used to keep the servers running and again is permitted by CCP.

If sites weren't allowed to run any adverts or affiliate links for PLEX or any other item then you would see every single single EVE service site close such as Dotan who offers an affiliate link and a donation link to keep the service operational.

scrapping shouldn't be the big deal. they don't seem to have a "terms of use". traffic wise .. If they have data all the way back to 2008 it's an estimate of about 1-1.5 gig worth of raw json data for 64 regions.

and it is easy (itterate date, get data). maybe a good starting project for you to start your datamine adventures.

@Gevlon and @anonymousof course they are doing RMT, if they pay their writers in ISK.They pay out isk to get content which leads to advertisement money.It really is only a single step between the ISK->$ conversion, not much for a RMT scheme.And this server cost covering bullshit is just that.They make multiple thousand dollars PER MONTH on advertisement alone. Additionally they have this "articles" with affiliate links to amazon etc..

The RMT starts when you pay customers with ISK, as it can be scaled to infinity. So if TMC readers get ISK for clicking on TMC ads or TMC affiliate links, that's RMT.

Paying your staff is technically also RMT but CCP not only tolerates it, but the whole affiliate system explicitly encourages it. CCP lets you make money in turn of creating EVE-related content, which increases the value of the EVE service.

"If someone finds a way to channel this Goon hate into a form that is more productive than posting, Goons will be evicted in a week."

They won't, because hate is never productive, anger can be channeled, hate? That is aimless, illogical and emotional (pathos) driven.

Harry Forever tried to channel his (whilst being entertaining with his long march to VFK), you tried to channel yours, it is entertaining, but little else.

I once asked someone why they hated Goons, they said it was because 2 Goons ganked them, so I check their killboard and ask them if they also hate the other corps who have ganked their mining ship.They replied that no, they did not hate, or even remember the other corps, but everyone hates goons so much that they must be doing something bad.

Herding cats has nothing on trying to channel people who are annoyed because...well, someone on a forum or blog told them to be.

Paying for services (a la TMC) is not RMT. That's been explicitly and repeadedtly stated by CCP. What they did ask TMC to do, and we complied immediately, is to NOT pay ISK for articles other than CCP-related games. Again, it's not RMT, but it's a gray area, and we were happy to comply.

The best way to get access to the data dotlan has is ask directly from wollari. If this kind of socializing is too much for you it seems to me you could in theory find a way to scrape the data from the statistic page if every solar system. It should be doable but not trivial.

Really, I sometimes read articles on TMC, but I never take the content as "pure truth". Any content comes directly or indirectly from the Mittens, so caution is advised....

Maybw you should get in touch with Wollari directly and ask him, or try to ge the recent data directly from your Eve client. The in-game map gives tons of valuable data, which you can then process into th data you need...

When the site first came out perhaps you could make an argument that it wasn't a propaganda site, but recently most(all but one) of their non-cfc writers have left because their stories were edited in a bia nature, or fired because they spoke up in meetings about such things. Only one person that writes for TMC is from outside of the CFC, and she is in of sound mind, which is some small alliance blue to Brave.

Needless to say, when all the people that happen to be the enemy of goons get fired for speaking up, or leave because of bias manipulation in the editing process then it's fair to call it a propaganda site.